Category Archives: Barbie and Ken

Cleaning in the library led me to rediscover an old project. Roy Rogers and Trigger had been sitting next to the TV in the library. I found them both on the floor between the TV and a book stack. Time to pick them up and put them back in shape.

The doll is a random military action figure rescued naked from a thrift store. I thought the face looked enough like Roy Rogers to turn him into that particular hero. The horse is from Mattel, and probably is part of a Barbie play-set. It was given to me by a relative. I dressed Roy in a Lone Ranger Captain Action uniform with a Tonto gun belt, both created by Playing Mantis Toy Company in the late 1990’s. The hat is actually from a Cowgirl Barbie because I wanted a Roy Rogers-style almost-white hat. The Lone Ranger hat is too flat-brimmed to look right and way too large to fit on Roy’s smaller head, and the only other cowboy hat I have for it is a Johnny West hat from Marx Toys in the 1960’s, and that is dark brown.

Everything Johnny West that I still have was salvaged from the house where I grew up back in the 1980’s. They belonged to my little brother, but ended up in my collection because he outgrew dolls and action figures long before I did. I wish I still had the doll himself, but I think Dabney blew him up with a firecracker when he was a teenager.

So, I have to be happy with only having Roy and Cowgirl Barbie to play with.

Goofy-guy doll collector, me, will now give you a grand tour of the Barbie Shelf. This is a place in my home that was originally created by the previous owners of the house. It was a place in the upstairs play room apparently meant for the things that needed to be kept out of little girls’ reach. Maybe pampers and baby wipes. Cleaning supplies. And possibly toys that were not to be broken immediately and had to be regulated. I don’t know why else you would grace a playroom with a shelf up near the ceiling and above the only door into the room. It was, however, perfect for the plastic people who were destined to take it over as their own.

It begins above the bedroom door. My wife has a thing about keeping her dolls mint in box. She has more of an eye to their value as collectible investments. The fashion Barbie nestled above the door in her box is a recreation of a 1962 doll that was reissued in 1999. You can also see the Teacher Barbie that the Princess once de-boxed and played with. And there you can also see the start of the Wizard of Oz collection. There are little munchkin dolls and the Ken doll dressed as the Cowardly Lion in the picture.

In front of Dorothy and Glinda from Oz, you see some of the recycled Goodwill Barbies that I bought naked and abandoned, cleaned and dressed, washed and tried to brush out their hair. One of them had some marker on her face that had to be soaked off with secret sauce to restore a more human look. The one in the middle is a 1980’s Asian Barbie. There is also a Cowgirl Barbie wearing an extra gun belt from a CA Lone Ranger set.

The kids are protected by Eustace the purple pottery dragon who was fired in my mother’s kiln during the height of her doll-making hobby and painted by me. The kids here include a tiny Tommy doll, three Skippers from the early 70’s, and Hermione from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. You can see the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in the back, and there’s also Goodwill Barbie that for some odd reason has purple hair.

My newest My Little Pony in mutant almost human form, Rainbow Dash the Equestria girl, is the blue doll in the middle here. Mary-Kate Olsen can be seen in the Blue dress. All you can see of Britney Spears here are her legs and feet, probably a safety feature of this tour. The topless ballerina Barbie is wearing a jacket, but I could not close it on her extra large Barbie mammaries. Princess Jasmine, my daughter’s somewhat beat-up favorite begins Disney Princess Row.

Li Shang is still mint in box, but Mulan isn’t even on the shelf any more. Some of Mom’s dolls got played with by the Princess. Mulan lost her hair. There is one American Girl doll here, bought at a yard sale for 25 cents, but I found a dress to fit her at Walmart in a sale bin. Unfortunately I can’t name her correctly yet and she is barefoot like most of the Goodwill dolls.

Almost to the end of the shelf, you can now see Apple Jack and Twilight Sparkle, my other two mutant pony girls, discovered at an After-Christmas Sale at Toys-R-Us. They are standing on Grandma Beyer’s home bingo set from the 1930’s, and Disney Princesses are lined up behind them.

At the tail end of the shelf you will see Twilight Sparkle again to take the focus off poor 1980’s nudist Skipper (I robbed her of her clothes for one of the older, more rare Skippers that are worth a bit more to collectors). Seated between is Asian Rock n Roll Barbie (Leah actually). You may have noticed I am careful not to over-identify any of the members of the collection. I got taken to task on E-Bay about descriptions of which Barbie was which once. There are people out there much more rabid about doll collecting than I. The difference between a 1980’s Butterfly Tattoo Barbie and an Anniversary Edition Malibu Barbie can get you challenged to a duel… with rapiers… in France. I had to talk him into balloons and blunderbusses (an idea borrowed from Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines), and I lost. I had to settle for the price offered even though my own research suggested I was not wrong. (Well, okay, maybe I didn’t really go through with the duel thing, but the argument was just as intense and just as silly as that.)

So that is my long-winded essay on the essentials of the Barbie Shelf. I will be looking at it a lot for the next few years since it is in the room I am using as my bedroom. (Not in perfect health, I needed a room that I could completely seal up at night in order to breathe better.) I really didn’t think I could pull off 500 words about this one goofy shelf in the house, but I now realize that I have nearly reached 900.

I was trying to think what I would post today, and coming up blank. I have a pathological need to keep posting here, especially since my brain is currently switched to editing mode for my novel The Magical Miss Morgan. One can’t keep a sacred oath to write every day if there is no writing going on other than editing (which doesn’t count because no new creative thoughts are being generated and the fertile spore-producing areas of my mental storage shed may grow sterile for want of fresh garbage being piled there). So I went looking through my file of photo Paffoonies to find something I haven’t already inflicted on potential readers to the point of making them gag and doing something sensible like shutting off their computer for a while. Unfortunately all I found was this potential gag-inducing library photo of the time the Mighty Thor got drunk on overripe Cheerios and milk and decided to commit cave-man love on beautiful topless mermaid Barbie. (I know… topless and in the possession of a fifty-eight-year-old man… kinda creepy… but honest, I am intending to make a shell bra with real sea shells and just haven’t gotten around to it yet, though I have the shells selected and the material cut. My sewing machine is broken. Yeah, that’s my story… and I’m sticking to it). (Goodness! That last parenthetic expression is the fifteenth longest one I have ever written!)

The picture was taken moments before the hammer came down to bonk her lightly on the brain. Fortunately, this is Barbie we are talking about, and the excess air inside her plastic head probably saved her from fatal brain damage. She was one of a half dozen naked Barbie dolls I rescued from Goodwill. She is grateful for any attention she gets nowadays and responded to Thor’s drunken love tap by falling madly in love with him. She chased the god of thunder all around the library that day to give him a big, fat mermaid smooch on the lips (or is that “big, fat, mermaid smooch on the lips”? …because she’s not a fat mermaid). She would have caught him too, but the mermaid fin-dress that I also found in a resale bargain store caused her to have to hop, and my messy library has so many un-filed books on the floor that she kept tripping and falling flat on her… face (yes, the face would’ve obviously hit the floor first, right?).

A week later I caught him obviously thinking about doing it again.

She likes to sunbathe in front of the Cheerios box that holds up one of the shelves on a nearby book case where the nails are coming loose. (I have fixed it since the picture was taken and used the Cheerios box full of sand to hold up something else entirely.)

I bought a mind-reading app for my digital camera and applied it to this photo because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he might be thinking about doing it again. I threw the moldy old discarded bowl of Cheerios away because… well, you know that spoiled milk smell, right? So, it couldn’t be that again. Anyway, here’s the processed picture because this is the end of this daily post. I have passed 550 words already.

I am sorry, but today’s post will probably bore you unless you are a doll-collecting, obsessive-compulsive bag of mixed nuts like I am. These are the kinds of details that only interest the true collect-a-holic. You see in the picture my mint in-the-box Star Trek Barbie and Ken, 1996 30th Anniversary Edition. It was a difficult track-down. Now, you Google it and you can get one for 25 dollars on e-Bay without breaking a sweat. When I got hold of this in 1998, however, it was a bit tougher to find. It started with a trip to Goodwill. My wife loves the bargain clothing and especially the shoes. (She’s from the Philippines and has a touch of Imelda Marcos Footwear Disease.) While there, with my young son in tow, in the toy section… I discovered two loose Barbie and Ken dolls that actually weren’t naked. Barbie’s head was severely damaged, and she had lost a leg. Ken was in practically un-loved, un-played-with condition. Both had uniforms. The Star Trek uniforms you see here on the two figures in front. (Ken was missing the shoes, phaser, and communicator, but the original accessories were pretty small and pitiful anyway. Barbie had no fishnet stockings and no shoes, along with no working head.) Of course I had to buy these wonderful items. They cost me 25 cents apiece. Gonga! I hadn’t known that such a 12″ action figure existed! (Okay, really a doll, but, you know…) I immediately began a search of toy stores and junk shops in South Texas. At the time we had relatives in Dallas. So I went prowling there too. You wouldn’t believe the looks I used to get from parents wondering what a forty-something old man by himself wanted in the Barbie section of KayBee Toys. Now they see my gray hair and figure, ah yes, shopping for his granddaughter (of which I have none, but I digress.) Finally I found the rare item in a San Antonio flea market stall. And it only set me back fifteen dollars. Wotta find! It made my goofy old collector’s heart glad for a couple of months afterwards… heck, that’s not true either! Sixteen years later it still makes me giddy.